SAN JOSE — Minutes matter when someone’s bleeding to death, and Santa Clara County doctors are involved in a national push born from mass casualty events that aim to educate residents on how to best serve as an unexpected first responder.

It’s similar to efforts to teach people how to properly use defibrillators or perform CPR, although in blood-loss situations that might make the squeamish blanch. While the genesis of the program was in the shadow of Columbine, Sandy Hook and the Boston Marathon bombing, the techniques are also well suited to an accident on the road, at home or in the workplace that has someone losing copious amounts of blood.

“A lot of times instead of doing field care, people will place the emphasis on getting someone to definitive care,” said Dr. Della Garland, the head surgeon of the trauma unit at Valley Medical Center. “And sometimes by then, the person has lost so much blood, we’re playing catch up for the physiological insult that their body has gone through.”

On Tuesday, Garland and other surgeons were discussing teaching techniques with about a dozen medical professionals at the hospital, who will in coming months go out into the community to relay the information to teachers and administrators at schools, construction organizations and others in the community who might be required to act fast. The aim is to get more and more people trained and eventually to make trauma packs commonly available in public places.

“There have been a lot of surveys of lay people, and they say that if they felt safe and were trained to do it, they would act,” said longtime VMC trauma surgeon Dr. John Sherck. “Not everyone would be willing, but this aims to make people who are willing feel comfortable to do so.”

The effort was born both from combat in the Middle East and horrific civilian tragedies starting with the Columbine High School shooting and, more recently, the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.

“What doctors saw in Iraq and Afghanistan was that with modern body armor, extremity injuries were quite common and there has been a push for zero preventable deaths,” Garland said.

They did that, she said, with tactics to quickly stop the bleeding in the field before the wounded can be delivered to medical personnel; employing tourniquets — sometimes doubling them up — and stuffing wounds with “combat gauze” impregnated with a clotting agent.

Military techniques can translate well to the civilian arena, and Kaila Curry — who led Tuesday’s presentation — said it’s been found that many massacre victims potentially could have survived if such methods were employed.

They also need to understand the basics of fast first aid. For example, tourniquets are good to stop heavy bleeding and don’t result in amputations due to circulation loss if in place less than two hours. And they hurt, a lot. As does shoving gauze into a wound.

“People need to know that the person will not be pleased that you are touching their bullet wound and applying extreme pressure to it,” Curry said, adding that instruction can veer into territory that seems obvious.

“I had one person ask me how tight they could apply a tourniquet to someone’s neck if it was bleeding,” she said.

Garland said that — fortunately — the benefits of the program would likely be seen at more everyday occurrences than what spawned the national effort.

“Usually, the touchstone is when something terrible happens,” Garland said. “But we don’t have to wait for a tragedy to strike our own community to be prepared.”

For more information about the national program, visit http://www.bleedingcontrol.org/ or https://www.dhs.gov/stopthebleed.

Eric Kurhi is a reporter for the Bay Area News Group based at The Mercury News. He covers Santa Clara County government and general assignment duties. An East Bay native, he has been editing and reporting at local newspapers since graduating from San Francisco State University in 1997.

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